From Tools to Communities: Designs to Support Online Creative Collaboration in Scratch

In this paper, we investigate the support of online creative collaborations among young programmers in Scratch. We designed and implemented two online collaboration events, the Collab Challenge and Collab Camp, implemented in January 2011 and in August 2011, respectively, in which members of the Scratch community were invited to work together on programming projects. This paper explores what we learned from iteratively designing and implementing the second event Collab Camp. In our analyses, we reflect on how the changes in context of collaboration (context), the opportunities for finding collaborators (connection), and the engagement of members in constructive feedback (critique) emerged as critical spaces supportive of online collaboration. We discuss how these spaces can serve as guiding principles for online communities that support young designers in creating expressive and personally meaningful projects together